


Marking Time

by Atropos_lee



Series: Watching [2]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:04:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atropos_lee/pseuds/Atropos_lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week later<br/>In which Ianto is introduced to some of many things to be done with a stopwatch</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marking Time

The yellowing memo on the board was signed Yvonne Hartman  
She’d been that kind of boss. A “People person.”  
 **Take Time for Yourself**  
 _You are the “Torchwood Talent” – our people, our greatest single asset, and I am proud to work with you all. In return you should receive the best from Torchwood, including a personalised Development Plan, designed around your specific needs and aspirations. To this end, you should expect monthly One-2-One time with your Line Manager._  
 _Be the Best; Live the Rest._

Ianto doubted even the late Yvonne Hartmann’s ideas of Work/Life balance included One-2-One Time with the Jack Harkness at 11.45 in the frigging pm. Without even the prospect of a meaningless acquaintance-shag to relieve the tedium. 

But he waited, as instructed, until Toshiko had closed down her station and swung out of the door with an over-cheery farewell, before tapping on the office window.

"How are you doing, Ianto?”

“Ok.”

Harkness just looked at him, with a steady assessing gaze that made Ianto feel anything but ok, but he didn’t want to give the satisfaction of revealing just how hollowed out he had become, so gritted his teeth, folded his arms and stared straight back. “I'm fine. Really. Is that all you wanted to know, sir? Because, I calculate I’ve been on my own time now for,” he checked his watch, “three hours and fifty minutes.”

“Got anything better planned for the evening, or were you just going to mooch around this place until two again? Seems to me, as long as we are both stuck here, pretending everythings fne, we might as well acheive something useful. Something you might find more interesting than filing. Just one warning. I already know you are good at keeping secrets. What happens next, you share with no one, understand? I don’t want to find anyone else in this team playing around with this stuff. It stays between you and me. Agreed?” 

Ianto nodded, intrigued for the first time, as Harkness unhooked his own watch from the chain across his waist, and held it cupped in his hand. “Could you brew some coffee, please.”

Ianto exploded. “What kind of fucked up test is this? Want to see if I’m grateful enough to still have a job and pulse to jump through hoops? Like me to clean your boots, sir, turn down your bed - or just bend over and spread on command.”

“No. Not right now. I’d just like coffee. Black.” Harkness clicked the button, and sat back, expectantly.

With a grunt Ianto pushed back his chair and slouched gracelessly towards the kitchen, uncomfortably aware that he probably looked like nothing so much a sulking teenager asked to clean his room.

As he waited for the kettle to boil he leaned his head on the wall and surveyed the mugs ranged in the cupboard. Gwen had bustled in to help him brew on her first day here. He had the impression it was the way she was used to making herself feel useful, making tea. WPC Cooper - tea and biscuits and a smile for the Desk Sergeant. She had blushed a horrible shade when he took the purple mug off the tray and placed it back on the shelf. “Not that one. That’s Suzie’s”. She hadn’t volunteered since.

The purple mug was still on the shelf. Next to the Dilbert Mug, (James) and the “World’s Best Mum”, (Eleri), and the “Viva Espana” with the chipped handle (Gwilym), and so on, back into the depths of the cupboard, long past his personal recollection, memory, but all part of the litany he’d heard from James on his second day here. A history of Torchwood in naff ceramic - the Royal Wedding, “I Killed JR”, Snoopy, The Silver Jubilee, the Bay City Rollers, decade upon decade of Torchwood, (“Lesley, Jo, Colin, Fergus, Heulwen, Group Captain Jones, Betty, Mair, Herbert”, back to dusty recesses where strange tins of Lipton’s Empire Blend and ration books lurked.

He really should clear the cupboard someday and bin the lot. 

Harkness clicked his watch again as Ianto placed the coffee on the desk.

“Thanks. How long do you think that took?”

“Ah, so we’re wasting your night off with a time-and motion-study. Want to make sure Torchwood is getting its money’s worth. Want to put in a vending machine instead?”

“Nah,” Harkness inhaled the coffee, and smiled, “the spoiled brats would kill me. Late nights, early starts, death, destruction, alien sex goo, six inches of water underfoot, pterodactyl shit on the desk – they love it. But 8 ounces of lukewarm instant crappuccino with non dairy crème in a polystyrene cup, and they’d cut up rough. Now, seeing you wasted my last night off wrecking my office and giving me a fat lip, and I haven’t even docked your pay, have the decency to answer the question. Exactly, how long do you think it took you to make this excellent cup of Joe?”

“I don’t know...”

“Think. Imagine you know the answer.”

“- Six and a half minutes.” 

“Why that number? Why not round it up? Ianto – seriously, I’m not jerking your chain, I really need to know.”

“Oh for Pete’s... It felt right, Ok.”

Harkness turned the watch around so he could read the dial. He squinted at the delicate enamelled figures.

“Six minutes, fifty-three seconds.”

“That’s close. Now, you could have said ‘Five’– or ‘about ten’. Most people would. You didn’t. Twenty three seconds out. Just as I expected."

"You know how long it makes to make coffee? Good for you, sir."

"No, I always suspected you had a good sense of time. You've just proved it.” Harkness took sip of coffee. “Can you tell what time it is right now?”

Ianto automatically flipped his wrist to read his watch, only to have Harkness slam his arm to the desk. “Don't look. Look at me. Tell me what time you know it is.”

“Midnight. After midnight ...”

“What does just after midnight feel like to you?”

“Dark. Dull. Bloody exhausting. What's the fucking point - what do you get out of this?” He pulled his arm back, but Harkness did not let go.

“Close your eyes. What time does it feel like to you?” Ianto stared into the blue eyes only inches away, sighed and closed his own.

Immediately he was aware of the hub around him, and all its idiosyncratic sounds. The grey buzz of the antiquated scanners in the corner, the orange hum of the generator, the constant ripple of water, never the same second on second, Jack’s pulse, and his, in an uneasy counter rhythm, the echoes of a car – an Audi? Something with a soft suspension - pulling out across the Plas, 50 metres above them... “well past midnight...” and then, with the softest little bump he was slipping further, sliding through the sounds, the lapping roar of traffic, the buzzing streets, the slap of slow black water on the docks, until he felt he was soaring through and beyond the city, on, to the very edge of the turning world – and he knew he was on the rim of a great cog, turning around the sun, whole universes whirling around him, with an endless fall under his feet, and only the pounding of two heartbeats to hold on to and keep from tumbling.

He snatched his hand back, and panted as the vertigo passed. “What the fuck...?”

Harkness seemed a little shaken himself. He glanced down at the single coffee mug, puzzled, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “You didn’t get yourself one?”

“I didn't think this was social. Jack – what was that? How did you do that? It was...”

“Terrifying?”

“Exhilarating. What the hell did you do to me?”

“You did it. I - I just had to give you a bit of a push, that’s all. Less of a push than I anticipated...You’re a natural. Temporal Hyper-acuity. Pretty rare. Amazingly Torchwood doesn’t seem to have made it part of the interview process, but I like to keep an eye on people, just in case. Like any talent, you have to learn how to make use of it.”

“I could do that again?”

“With the right training you could know every crumb of time, what it feels like, from the click of an atom to the heave of a star. Know that, and it’s like a map. In your finger tipsour bones. You can stop time..” Jack’s thumb gently stroked the watch still cradled in his hand, “or slip through it completely.”

A splutter of disbelief reached Ianto’s lips, but stopped there. He stared at Jack, the arcane riddle making perfect sense somewhere in his body, if not yet his head. “That’s what you’ve been talking about - to teach me? How to reach that place again...” Ianto struggled find the words to describe the glory he had felt on the edge of the great wheel, as the universe turned.

“Yes. But it takes time, effort, to learn how to navigate in that many dimensions. You start by using this.” he tapped the watch again, caressed the button. “You start with tasks that will take your full attention to complete. Like making good coffee. Or putting a clock together. Completing a Puzzle. The watch is just a control, it helps to calibrate your own, internal, sense of time - like a chronometer on a ship. Soon you always know exactly when you are, as well as where.” Jack grinned. “It was the first thing I learned on the job. My first career that is... Call it Pilot School! Weeks and weeks of exercises, two seconds, two hours, two days at a time, until I could tell you when I was as easily as I could tell which way up.”

“Beats learning how to make coffee.” 

Jack drained his mug. “But you make it so well! Make us both another, and we’ll start.” Ianto rose, eagerly this time but Jack raised his hand, with the watch, and Ianto drew breath like a runner on the blocks “Don't rush it. I'm not timing you, you not trying to beat the watch. This is just a tool. Don’t try to count. Put all your attention on the job in hand, do it perfectly. The best coffee you've brewed to date. Then, when you've finised - I want you to stop the watch, and see if it tallies with your perception. You understand. It's the button at the top.”

Fresh drawn water, kettle, mugs, warmed pot, three scoops of Columbian. Still shaking. Fumbled scoop, hands shaking, grounds scattered across the table. Wipe, grounds into hand, into bin, fold cloth. Kettle poised. Wait. Count six. Pour. Stir. Two mugs. 

Jack hadn't moved, he still held the watch out in front of him, the chain looped over his wrist. Ianto put down the mugs, reached across, and clicked the stop button. “Seven minutes. Seven minutes and...”, he trailed off, losing confidence.

“Relax. Imagine you know the answer. Guess.”

Ianto squeezed his eyes shut, and slid back into that dark sense of the world around him. He was lost, with no idea what to say. He guessed, widely, feeling acutely foolish. “Seven minutes and forty-three seconds.”

“Seven fifty seven. Twelve seconds out. A1. See - you’re a fucking born tempro-naut, Ianto Jones!”

Ianto opened his eyes, and checked the watch himself, frowning. Seven fifty seven. The thrill at the sight of the stopped hand was unexpected, inexplicable,. Then he realised he was still cupping Jack’s hand, and pulled away as if burnt. “Ok. What next. I can’t make coffee all night – I’ll be on the ceiling with the Pterodactyl.” 

“Oh , don’t worry – there are lots of things we can do with a stopwatch.” Jack un-holstered his gun, and placed on the desk “We went through this on the range. Break it down, clean and reassemble.”

 

+++++++++++++++

It’s 2.57 am. Ianto knows that to the second. Almost to the second. He’s light headed, and for the past one hundred and fifty minutes he’s forgotten to hate Jack Harkness, which is something of a relief, if temporary.

The desk is scattered with puzzles and junk, the remnants of, seven sudoku, two pages of standard Aurelian Cipher drill, a reconciliation of the entire team’s timesheets for the past month, the plug on the toaster, which has been without a fuse for over a month, and now a small flock of origami cranes, which Jack, intrigued by Ianto’s unlikely skill with paper, is determinedly learning trying to fold out of graph paper.  
He hesitates over a fold, “Looks a bit like like the pterodactyl.” 

Ianto is holding the watch for once, reversing the roles of the past two hours. It’s warm and butter smooth. “She’s a Pteradon, actually.” 

“Whatever.” Jack pulls the tail and the bird flaps. “I always wondered how that worked!” He stops the watch in Ianto’s hand, reeling off the exact time, to the half second, showing off, although Ianto doesn’t mind, even when his closest score is still nine seconds out. He has rarely seen Jack like this, even on the handful of nights when they fucked on this very desk. Flushed, hectic, reckless; he’d suspect alcohol, but he knows that nothing but water has passed Jack’ lips since one-thirty.

“This”, Jack says, brandishing the slightly lopsided bird, “is the ideal stage one exercise, something you have to lose in yourself to get right, meditative. Stage two, that's the stuff that tricky, the stuff that changes normal time perception completely ... Like rock climbing, or salsa, or sex...” Jack stops, abruptly, remembering who he is speaking to. He drops the paper crane. “Ianto, it’s past three.”

“I know...”

“You really should go home now.” 

“Another few minutes... ” He reaches for another square of paper, trying to remember the first fold for a Leaping Sea Bass. Jack pulls the pad out of his reach.

“Ianto, you can’t do it all in a single night.”

“What’s the alternative? Lying awake all bloody night, waiting for the alarm....” Ianto bites his lip, unwilling to give more away. But Jack only nods.

“I know”

“I’m fine, really.”

“I know.”

“That place again, that feeling, when all of Cardiff was laid out around me...”

“... all of time, all of space...”

“It felt as if anything was possible.”

“Ianto, that ‘place’ can drive you mad.”

“Christ, I think I’m going mad here and now. There isn’t any part of me that doesn’t hurt like ... I’m like a beetle with its fucking legs torn off.” His hand closes over the watch, the knurled buttons and winder cutting into his flesh. “What’s the fucking point?” Jack says nothing, but reaches for the watch, his long fingers easing Ianto’s away from the case, but not taking it, so that watch and hand rest within his grasp. Ianto knows he is losing it, that his next words will be choked with tears. “Make it stop, Jack. Make it stop.”

And Jack just folds his hand around Ianto’s - and it is as if all the light in the room suddenly turns and faces the other way. Ianto’s heart skips a beat, then pounds in his ears, but every other sound in the hub is gone. The hiss and tick and hum of the building is dead. A vein is jumping in Jack’s temple. He can’t breathe, daren’t look away from Jack’s icy gaze, certain from the ball-tightening sensation that he is teetering on the edge of a precipice, afraid to fall, afraid not to fall.

“Look at the watch.” Jack’s voice is grating, too deep, too slow to reach his ears, like the grinding of continents. The effort to turn his head, look down at their joined hands makes Ianto shake.

The hands of the watch are still.

Ianto opens his mouth to speak, but the syrupy air won’t fill his lungs.

As, with a shudder that shakes the whole room, the second hand starts to move backwards.

Ianto snatches back his fingers, the watch hits the desk, and all the sounds of the hub rush back into to fill the void. 

Ianto picks up the watch. It’s ticking jauntily, hands sweeping in the normal direction. Only the queasiness in his stomach convinces Ianto that he has seen more than a conjurer’s trick. He flips it over, looking for the trick. “You stopped the watch.”

“Did I?” Jack slumps back, paler than Ianto has ever seen him. He reaches for the cold coffee, discards it in weary disgust. “Look at it. 1939 Logines, Air Ministry issue – one of the best mechanical watches ever produced. It’s survived more crashes than I have. You know it didn’t stop.”

“Then you stopped time...”

“I –" Jack winces, rubs his temple as if it pains him, “- twisted it a bit.”

Ianto turns the watch over and over, possibilities tumbling through his head, not sure what question to ask first. 

“Ianto, that’s all I can do. I can go to that place you saw, the still point in time, but all I can do, sitting here, is twist it, just a little. It’s like standing on the edge of an airfield without a plane. All I can do is jump a foot in the air and land again. With a headache the size of Utah for my pains. That’s what I meant about going crazy.”

"But I saw it all, laid out to step across..."

“I know.I see it too. But no one can just walk across time. In theory, yes. you could go anywhere. Anywhen. As long as you had a plane that could do the distance. ”

“Back?”

“Is that what you want?”

Ianto just looks at the watch. Back three weeks, and Lisa would be waiting for him in the basement. Back eighteen months, and she’d be at her desk, tongue between her teeth as she concentrated on the figures darting across her laptop screen, tracking ghosts. Two years, and he’d never know her, never know Torchwood, never meet Jack Harkness, just an ex-student, window shopping in the world. 

“What would happen – in theory – if I went back...”

“... and saved Lisa? You would be a hero, you'd be happy for an hour or two or three, but you would almost certainly bring about the end of the world as we know it – fire, brimstone and great big scary monsters. But hey, you’re the crazy guy who kept a cyberwoman in the cellar for your , I’m sure you wouldn’t let a silly little thing like the apocalypse get in your way. Your choice.”

“Jack Harkness, you are the biggest bastard on the whole sodding planet. You claim to know how to travel in time, you take to see me the whole fucking universe, and then you tell me I can’t do anything with it..”

“Yep - Told you it could drive you insane, stuck here, day after day, this close to the rift, able to see the most fabulous destinations, always out of reach.” Jack tapped his forehead “I can’t even sleep away the hours anymore, without time seeping into my head. So, I thought I’d spread the joy a little.”

“So all this,” Ianto spread arms encompassed the watch, the debris on the desk, the cluttered office, “all this is pointless. A waste of fucking time. Unless... could we use the rift?”

“Ianto... Ok, it’s like flying. I could teach you the theory of flight, you could suck up every book in the subject, learn the layout of every cockpit in existence, we could spend hours in a simulator, land at any airfield in the world, loop the loop thirteen times and throw up into your hat. But when we open the door and step down we would be exactly where we started. So you get desperate enough, and you stand on the top of a cliff – and that’s all the rift is, the Grand Canyon of the spiral arm - you jump, flap your arms, and for maybe 10 seconds you’re in freefall. Flying. Then splat. Still nowhere.” 

“So, you need a plane.”

“Exactly. And that’s why we’re sitting on the rift right now. The biggest scrapheap this side of Alpha Centuri. Sooner or later what we need will just come drifting through here, with or without a pilot. And when it does – we’ll be ready.”


End file.
